We have had a few donations already. I have a crude ledger up at http://nesdev.com/donate/. I will get the ledger cleaned up and looking a bit better soon. We are currently around 20% of the goal for a new server.

Thanks to those who have donated. entries marked with "--" for the name are those who I am waiting for a reply on if the donation is anonymous or not.

I think that expenses related to hosting would be a good use of funds generated by the action53 cartridge sales. I think it would also be nice to have the compo contribute to to the reoccurring maintenance fees as well. As for the ads/donations I don't have much input personally. I like seeing the donate button up there, and the ads are of no concern since I'm always logged in when I visit.

I might regret asking this, but I'm genuinely curious and would like to be educated on the matter if someone's willing to entertain me. So please pardon my naivety, but what are the reasons/benefits of hosting the site in the manner which is has been used for years and using an alternative like bluehost? I can assume that somehow you're getting what you pay for considering the costs are somewhere on the order of 10x more expensive. I'm only basing this off of the costs posted in the initial post, and what I'm used to paying for hosting my own site. Perhaps my fees are lower because of volume of visitors..? Or is the site's volume of data so big that it necessitates something more costly..? Something special about bbs?

Anyway, I'm just genuinely curious. If it was of any help I'd gladly offer up sharing my own server space at no charge, and giving WhoaMan or whoever full administrative access. I'm guessing it's not quite that simple though... Pretty sure I really only know enough about such matters to get myself in trouble when it comes to these web hosting matters.

_________________If you're gonna play the Game Boy, you gotta learn to play it right. -Kenny Rogers

I think that expenses related to hosting would be a good use of funds generated by the action53 cartridge sales. I think it would also be nice to have the compo contribute to to the reoccurring maintenance fees as well. As for the ads/donations I don't have much input personally. I like seeing the donate button up there, and the ads are of no concern since I'm always logged in when I visit.

I might regret asking this, but I'm genuinely curious and would like to be educated on the matter if someone's willing to entertain me. So please pardon my naivety, but what are the reasons/benefits of hosting the site in the manner which is has been used for years and using an alternative like bluehost? I can assume that somehow you're getting what you pay for considering the costs are somewhere on the order of 10x more expensive. I'm only basing this off of the costs posted in the initial post, and what I'm used to paying for hosting my own site. Perhaps my fees are lower because of volume of visitors..? Or is the site's volume of data so big that it necessitates something more costly..? Something special about bbs?

Anyway, I'm just genuinely curious. If it was of any help I'd gladly offer up sharing my own server space at no charge, and giving WhoaMan or whoever full administrative access. I'm guessing it's not quite that simple though... Pretty sure I really only know enough about such matters to get myself in trouble when it comes to these web hosting matters.

There are a few reasons why I prefer to self host in a co-location environment. One of the main ones has to do with many legal departments not understanding that NES development and such is not illegal, I don't have to worry about services being shut off based off of a misunderstanding.

Another reason is that we have offered (and plan to offer more) hosting for various NES or retro related sites, most hosting providers either do not allow or throw a fit when you are hosting multiple sites under one account.

I also like the peace of mind knowing that if something goes wrong or breaks, I can drive across town and get my hands on the server. I do not have to rely on a hosting company to restore services as I can usually run down and do it myself.

Another plus is that between the servers my work has co-located at the same location and the NesDev server, we can use the rest of the rack for free. any future expansion or projects will not cost anything extra besides hardware costs.

There are many other small reasons, but the ones I listed above are the ones I am most concerned with.

Are the co-location fees you mentioned just for NESDev, or is NESDev just one of several things using it? (i.e. is all $910/annual dedicated to NESDev?)

the $910 is dedicated to just the NesDev server. The current NesDev server is a 1U Dell Poweredge, the ISP charges per rack unit up to a certain point. My work has 6 2u servers + a 1U router co-located and when you add in the NesDev server it brings is to where we can use the rest of the rack.

what are the reasons/benefits of hosting the site in the manner which is has been used for years and using an alternative like bluehost?

"Shared hosting" setups don't let you change, say, the stop word list or minimum word length for MySQL's built-in full-text search. (To work around that, I ended up writing my own full-text search.) To get this sort of customization, you need the next step up, a "VPS" (virtual private server). On a VPS, you run your own stripped-down Linux (with most drivers removed), your own nginx or Apache, your own PHP, and your own MySQL.

Quote:

Something special about bbs?

I think our copy of MySQL is specially configured so that we can search for three-letter words.

Thanks; this was helpful to me. I use Stylish instead, although a similar code is usable with Stylish to do the same thing. I have no PayPal account or credit card so I cannot donate with that anyways, although you are of course correct that anyone who does want to donate later can temporarily disable it (and if some day I can donate, I expect that I will).

Here is the code for using it with Stylish in case it helps anyone (although if you already know Stylish, you can probably easily convert the above code yourself anyways):

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